Monthly Archives: October 2012

So, I bobbled this a bit. The wonderful folks at Top2Bottom Reviews were supposed to host my cover reveal for Book Two and a special Halloween-themed excerpt. Which they did! But while they posted what was a very fun interview and a lovely review by Gabbi (thank you Gabbi!) there was some last-minute confusion and changes to the cover art so the version they have posted there isn’t the final version, and also the excerpt I sent them apparently wasn’t formatted properly so it’s a bit hard to read.

SO! I am going to put the cover art and excerpt here as well, with TONS of love to T2B for hosting me yesterday!

Rachel Haimowitz and Cat Grant of Riptide Publishing had a brilliant idea to donate a dollar to the American Red Cross for every one of their titles (see the links on their names) sold in the next week, and I’ve decided to climb on board. Even though I’m not a part of Riptide, there’s no reason I can’t make a similar offer. So for every copy of my book that I sell this week, I will donate $1 to the Red Cross.

Head over to Dark Divas Reviews to see why AJ is giving Inertia 4.5 Delightful Divas, and enter to win a giveaway! There you will also find an new free read, the steamy Kitchen Floor Scene from Chapter 13 of Inertia. Check it out!

I am switching my distribution to Itunes, Kobo and Barnes & Noble to sell directly through these channels rather than distributing to them via SmashWords. This will not only increase my royalties by a small margin, but it will enable faster response times when I need to change something in my listings, and it will provide my readers with a higher quality file, as the epubs I have produced myself have looked better than the ones formatted by SmashWords.

There will be some downtime, however, while I get my ducks in a row. I hope to be back up and selling through these channels within a week or two.

Though this first chapter has been available at the end of Inertia for some time, I just realized I had never posted it here. I will do so now. Also, be sure to check out the other bonus excerpt from Acceleration over at Brandon Shire’s blog!

Stay tuned at the end of October for a third excerpt coming to Top2Bottom reviews, along with the cover reveal for Acceleration!

So I’m going to be sulking just the tiniest bit over the next few days because it seems like the cool kids are all going to play in Albuquerque at GayRomLit 2012, but I got involved in the m/m romance publishing biz too late this year and on too tight a budget to make that happen. SO JEALOUS! I wanna go play! Instead, I’ll be following their tweets avidly and stewing in my sad disappointment.

No, seriously, guys. Have fun and I look forward to hearing the war stories!

In other news, there are some very big things happening in the next few weeks.

The first is that sometime within the next week, Inertia is going to be available in print through Amazon CreateSpace, complete with an all-new cover by BookNibbles. The ebook cover will be updated to match as well. Never fear, I’ll still be keeping Kerry Chin‘s amazing artwork. Only the layout will be different.

And around Halloween, unless catastrophe strikes Kerry, I’ll be doing a cover reveal for Acceleration over at Top2Bottom Reviews, complete with a Halloween-themed snippet from Acceleration itself! So be sure to check back on the 30th for a sneak peak at one of the most entertaining chapters from Acceleration, Impulse Book Two.

Sometime in the near future I’ll also be doing an interview over on the blog of the amazing Brandon Shire, about which I’m very excited. Brandon is a writer to admire, both in the lgbt genre and as a fellow self-published author, and he’ll be sharing an entirely different sneak peak from Acceleration.

If all goes well with the editing process, Acceleration should be released in late November or early December, in both ebook and print format. In early to mid November I hope to release eARC review copies for reviewers who want them in advance.

I was largely quiet through September because I was working on a new project, a manuscript intended to be my first-ever submission to a publisher. I wrote over 65K words in 29 days, which was an incredible accomplishment for me. While of course I hope the manuscript is accepted, even if it’s not, I’m very much looking forward to the learning experience that comes with submitting to a publisher, especially any sort of editorial feedback I might get in the process of the rejection, if it does end up being rejected. I actually take a huge amount of enjoyment in receiving edits and critique, because I’m always looking to improve.

I had intended to work on Velocity, Impulse Book Three for NaNoWriMo in November, but finishing up this manuscript intended for submission ahead of schedule left me with three weeks I hadn’t anticipated having. I’ve decided to use that time to begin working on Book Three so that come November, I have more available time to work on the final edits and release of Book Two. Ideally I would like to have that released in time for the holiday shopping season, though it all depends on how much work is entailed in the editing process. I have a very good feeling about the manuscript, in that I believe it’s well paced, well plotted, and well characterized. My brilliant editor, however, may disagree.

With Inertia I knew there were issues with the manuscript with regard to plotting and characterization, which was why I decided to use my editing budget on a developmental edit rather than a line edit. And I was absolutely right. The feedback I received in that edit resulted in a complete, from-scratch rewrite of 40-50% of the book. Anyone who has remarked that they loved the characters or felt the pacing and development of the relationship worked? They have Danielle Poiesz to thank for that.

I don’t have that feeling with Acceleration, that feeling that it needs a lot of work to be the book I want it to be. I feel like it’s an incredibly solid book, probably the most solid I’ve ever written. I can attribute at least some of that to the learning experience I had during the editing process of Inertia. The wonderful P.D. Singer did a pre-edit beta read for me and seemed very positive about it as well, so I think it’s not just me.😀 As a result, the editing service I’m paying for this time around is a line edit with developmental features instead of a developmental edit. Unless those developmental features end up requiring a lot more revision than anticipated, the editing should go pretty quickly and allow for a timely release.

So! A lot of REALLY EXCITING STUFF coming down the line in the next month or two! Stay tuned!

John Green reblogged this post over on Tumblr, which is a very thoughtful post Cassandra Clare made about bullying and anon hate. I felt compelled to respond:

I confess, I don’t know enough about Cassandra Clare to have an opinion on any of the controversy that has gone down regarding her. I’ve heard mumbles and rumors, but not enough to form any sort of informed stand.

But this stuff? This is not okay.

I may be just a small self-pubbed author with one book under her belt and another on the way, but I discovered long before I published that anyone with any degree of notoriety attracts anon hate. I’ve had my own cabal of trolls stalking me from place to place, leveling vile and untrue accusations about me because somewhere along the line, I had the audacity to butt heads with them over something or say something they didn’t like.

I didn’t announce the publication of my novel to a pool of readers who would have really would have liked to know about it, readers who would have been invaluable in spreading the news that I had published and offered me a lot more sales, because I was afraid that if I made any sort of announcement, my trolls would see it and publicly harass me at a time when that sort of negative publicity would be absolutely catastrophic to reputation. Dozens, maybe even hundreds, of people who have read and enjoyed my writing in other places have no idea that this is the name I am publishing under or that I’ve published at all. I handicapped myself straight out of the gate to avoid that possibility.

In the past, I’ve been accused of being a drama hound for not letting unacceptable behavior slide, for not following the “don’t feel the trolls” doctrine. But it rankles my sense of justice, that people who behave that way don’t have to face consequences, because if anyone calls them on it, it just eggs them on.

Frankly, it’s terrorism, is what it is. The same mechanic is at play, using fear and intimidation and threats of violence/reprisal to 1) silence a target/enemy, 2) prevent anyone from holding you accountable for your actions and 3) trying to force a target/enemy to behave a certain way or capitulate to certain demands.

It’s terrorism. And it’s cowardly.

If you ever descend to sending vitriol, however warranted you may feel it to be, anonymously, you are a coward using terrorist tactics. You lose absolutely all moral high ground because you lack the courage of your convictions. You are so ashamed of your opinions or the behavior resulting from them that you don’t even want them traced back to you.

When I was in my senior year of high school, my AP Western Civilization teacher us a story. Back in the early 80s, before our school district had a sex ed curriculum, one night a guest speaker was booked to come do a presentation about teens and sexuality in the auditorium. But the parents and clergy (and bear in mind this area had the highest number of churches per capita of anyplace in the entire country, so the clergy were very influential) got wind that this guest speaker intended to talk about masturbation. The parents and clergy complained, and the guest speaker’s appearance was cancelled.

The students protested. One day, after fourth period, they staged a walk-out. En masse they rose from their desks, walked out to the front lawn of the high school, and sat down for twenty minutes, then peacefully returned to class.

During those twenty minutes, the teachers were instructed that they were to give detention for cutting class to every student who walked out. A number of the teachers simply didn’t, in a show of solidarity with the students.

My Western Civ teacher was one of those. But he went about it a bit differently. When his students returned to class, he looked at them and told them that he had been instructed to issue detentions, but that he wasn’t going to do it.

“But,” he said, “if you truly believe in what you just did, if you believe you were right, if you believe you were justified, if you stand by your actions and have the courage of your convictions, you will go down to the principal’s office right now and demand your detentions. Because actions, even justified actions, have consequences, and if you believe in something enough to undertake the action, you have to believe in it enough to accept those consequences, or you’re a hypocrite.”

Every one of his students went down to the office to demand their detentions. He said it was the proudest day he would ever have as a teacher. He had tears in his eyes as he related the tale.

When I say trolls lack the courage of their convictions, this is what I mean. Not only do they, as Ms. Clare rightfully points out, break the social pact, but they take advantage of the lack of accountability inherent in the anonymous nature of internet interactions to do it.

If they truly believed in what they were saying, they would put their name to it. They would accept the consequences for it, whether that consequence is adhering to a permanent ban from their fora of choice, or having their employer discover just how they behave on the internet.

But they don’t, and that is why they are always wrong, no matter how justified they may believe themselves to be.

Without accountability, there can be no meaningful protest. Without accountability, it’s all just noise and bluster.

I’ve been watching on Twitter as a colossal piece of irony unfolds. On this week, of all weeks, Amazon has removed from their listings the newly released psychosexual thriller Flesh Cartel by Rachel Haimowitz and Heidi Belleau of Riptide Publishing.

As the authors rightfully point out, this is the same Amazon which sells Lolita, Flowers in the Attic, any number of works by Stephen King, all of which have content that is far more objectionable. Not to mention the proliferation of self-pub tentacle rape porn.

At best, that makes this move of Amazon’s hypocritical. At worst, it smacks of homophobia, because the obvious difference here is that the sibling protagonists (neither of whom is a minor, btw, unlike any number of books carried on Amazon–again, let’s eyeball Flowers in the Attic) are male.

I haven’t read Flesh Cartel yet. I definitely intend to when I feel like getting my dark on but I’m on a deadlines for the next couple months and can’t afford to jerk myself out of the headspace of my current projects. But I find this move of Amazon’s infuriating and as an author, I have to wonder which of us is next?

Therefore, I would encourage anyone and everyone to contact Amazon and register a complaint about this. Whether you support the subject matter or not, I think we can all agree that banning books = BAD, no matter what week it is.